Working at Google: Enterprise

In three other posts, I wrote about showing movies, hosting author talks, and other cultural events I was responsible for at Google. You could be forgiven for asking “But didn’t you do any actual work?” So now I’ll answer that. Maybe it will give you some insight about what it’s really like to work there, or at least, what it was like. I have it on good authority that it’s quite a bit different now.

I joined Google on November 14, 2005. Orientation took a morning, and that was it. We got our pictures taken for the badge, learned where the T-shirt cabinet was (it was always empty since people grabbed the free T-shirts right away), and taken to lunch at Charlie’s Cafe, the original Google cafe.

On Friday, we all had to sit together at the TGIF meeting wearing our propeller beanies, and Sergey had us all stand up for a round of applause. Then he gave his signature line, which always drew a laugh:

Welcome to Google. Now get back to work.

Enterprise, or the Google Search Appliance

The Director of Enterprise was Ricardo Jenez, whom I knew from Oracle. Yes, this is the Old Boy Network in action. However, I still had to go through multiple rounds of interviews, so Ricardo didn’t have the power to just hire me.

You’ve probably forgotten about this, but Google used to sell an actual box to go on your network inside your firewall.

This beauty can be yours for under $1,300 on eBay.

The Google Search Appliance was for sale for a long time, but it’s now abandoned. There were secretive institutions that simply did not trust the cloud, including what we called the Three-Letter Agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)

Nearly all Google services are designed to run on multiple machines in server farms. The machines are built by Google to be blazing fast and not particularly user-friendly. They run in “prod” (for “production”), and the prod network is rigorously separated from the “corp” network that the rest of the company does its work on, so that an intruder who manages to get into prod still can’t get into corp. Prod machines are never kept in an office where an ordinary person can get his hands on them; they’re always in racks in high-security buildings.

Google software is not designed to run on a single machine. Yet that’s what Enterprise was selling. This made us pariahs, in a sense, and some people in “Google proper” (as we called them) tended to think we shouldn’t even exist. They refused to devote an instant of their time to making their software run efficiently on the GSA. However, it did run well enough that companies bought it. “Google for your enterprise” was a compelling sales proposition when Google was the hottest company on the planet.

The One Box

When I joined, Dave Girouard, the VP in charge of Enterprise, made a point of greeting me and saying how happy he was that I was going to be doing “one box.” That was the first time I heard that I’d been sold as the guy who could solve this problem. Exciting!

One Boxes were something that Google on the Web had, where the search results are not links to the answer, but the answer itself, somewhat like this (although this picture is from 2022, not 2005)

Google on the Web had One Boxes for common queries like the weather, stock prices, airline flight data, FedEx tracking, etc. The idea was, the search appliance would do that for your enterprise data. Nowadays, they’ve taken that idea of “give the answer itself instead of links to it” to an extreme.

I immediately saw the potential for the One Box to call out to enterprise software providers, like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce, etc. Instead of having to log into those services to get the answer, Google would just get it for you! Unfortunately, there was already a person who was officially the project leader for One Box, she had already written a design spec, and it didn’t have any of that. Her spec also depended on SOAP because it was a “standard.” SOAP was a very complicated, XML-based thing which would have been a very hard sell to anyone.

Ricardo was unwilling to formally replace her, a Google veteran, with me, a newbie. Still, I managed to go directly to the product manager and wrest control from her (“wrest” == “REST,” get it?). REST is a more web-oriented set of practices (not an official standard) which has become a de facto standard over the years. It was a very easy sell to outside vendors. The GSA would call them with the user’s query in a REST-ful way, and they would provide a “connector” to give the answer. Thus, someone could query the GSA about some SAP or Oracle bit of data and get the answer right in their search results!

Next, I wrote a Python program to simulate the GSA calling them, so that vendors could develop on it and be ready with their connectors. Making a long story short: it was a mega-hit!

Official Google announcement

ZDNet announced it:

As expected, Google has announced tonight they are starting to provide OneBox for the enterprise search appliance. Theoretically, this will make make finding sales forecasts as easy as weather forecasts.

The official Google Blog drops a few big names such as Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com -- all of which now have OneBox modules for enterprise search. Just in time for the Q1 earnings report, these new partnerships breathe some new life into the product that makes up 2% of their revenue.

Video with IBM, Cognos, Salesforce, and SAS executives speaking about Enterprise One Box.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that with a bang-up opening like that, Google would have quickly announced One Box 2.0, expanded the product drastically, and moved to attain World Domination in Enterprise search. This was my natural inclination from other jobs.

There was oddly little internal talk about it. It wasn’t exactly hushed up, but we weren’t invited to present at the TGIF company-wide meeting either. Maybe the top management didn’t want to make a big splash in the enterprise market? There’s nothing wrong with a consumer company doing that, by the way. Very few companies are great at both consumer sales and enterprise sales.

Now, years later, Google does make a serious effort in enterprise sales: mail, office, cloud services, etc.

Life Outside of Work

Unfortunately, 2006 was an annus horribilis for me personally. I can’t possibly separate all this from work life.

Going chronologically:

• I was singing in the chorus for a community theater production of Carmen. It was insane of me to do this with a new job, given how much rehearsal time something like that requires. I guess I’d always wanted to do Carmen and I’d promised to do it: those are the only excuses I can think of. Self-inflicted.

• In addition, Carmen is a long and demanding opera, with many bits for the chorus, and tempers got frayed often. Our director quite often yelled in rehearsals; not his usual self. I had done five other operas by then, so the novelty of being in an opera had completely worn off.

• My cat Nick, 21 years old at that point, died in January (see below for a photo).

• For some insane reason, I decided that this was a good time to remodel my kitchen, since now there’d be no worries about the cat getting out, with all the workmen leaving the door open. I know, I know: this one was totally self-inflicted, too.

• My brother Jack, age 64, died in March. He’s on the right, not smiling as he usually didn’t. I was, let’s say, a bit younger.

This one is somewhat more recent, Jack with his characteristic scowl

• I got a sinus infection which just would not go away. I had a horrible cough and had to do something I’d never done in a show before, namely, drop out. I really couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t have a coughing fit on stage. A doctor ended up giving me Prednisone, plus massive antibiotics, which had all kinds of unpleasant side effects.

• I had to have a tooth pulled, which was probably the least of all these troubles.

• In November, my mother died, after about a four-month bout with cancer. This is her and Dad from about 1940:

  

  Mom with Nick

  

A very, very bad year. It took a long time to recover from all this. Several years, in fact.

Google Culture

I was, of course, always the oldest person in any room. It really did not seem like an issue to me. Maybe it really was and I was just oblivious, but then, ignoring unpleasantness is an underrated life skill. There were a lot of people there whom I really liked.

There were electric scooters that you could check out and ride to different parts of campus. Nowadays scooters are ubiquitous on city streets, but they were a novelty for me then. Once we had a race outside around our building. The two contestants ran in opposite directions to minimize the possibility of collisions. When HR heard about it, they told us not to do that anymore.

Another time, HR announced Pajama Day: you were supposed to wear your pajamas to work. Why? Just for fun. HR said carefully, “This is not supposed to be ‘wear what you sleep in’; it’s ‘wear pajamas’. “ I didn’t feel like doing that but I brought a bathrobe in case there was a group photo. This idea fell flat; most people felt like I did and wore normal clothes.

At Christmas, Google had a tradition that was very carefully not talked about in public for obvious reasons: everyone got ten $100 bills for a Christmas present. It was cash and not a check because hundred dollar bills just feel like money. I was worried that a lot of stores wouldn’t take a bill that large, but almost all of them did.

In case you’re planning to stick up a Google shuttle near Christmas time: stand down. They’re not doing that anymore, and haven’t for some time.

Food

Everyone’s heard about the free food at Google. 5 1/2 years after retiring, I still miss being able to choose a cafe based on their menu that night, go there and get food already prepared, eat, and not have to clean up afterward. I know I’ll never have that again.

But it was even more extravagant than you’ve heard back then. I mentioned that I was in the chorus for Carmen, which meant I had rehearsals almost every night. There wasn’t any time to go to a cafe and eat dinner, so I would get a box of food for dinner while I was at lunch, and then sit in the microkitchen and eat before rehearsal.

At the time, the microkitchens were much better stocked than they are now. It became such a money pit that it was too much even for Google, and they cut back. But then, I would see person after person come to the microkitchen just before going home and fill bags of food to take with them. .

Other Free Stuff

Every employee got a credit of $150 to spend on various goodies with the Google logo on them: lined jackets, T-shirts, wheeled backpacks, nice stuff. I still have some of it.

What was interesting, though, was the bad quality of a lot of it. I got the wheeled backpack and used it on a trip, and as I was boarding the plane, all the stuff started falling out on the jetway. It wasn’t that the zipper was broken; the two halves were of different lengths, so there was no way it could possibly close. There was another piece of merchandise that I had to send back, but unfortunately I can’t remember what it was.

Of course I’m not complaining about something that’s free, but I had the feeling that the outside vendors saw these eager young Googlers waving their checkbooks and said, “Hello, sailor!”

On to Ads

As I said, after One Box I had miscellaneous tasks. I connected the GSA to Borgmon, the monitoring framework that Google had. I built a Microsoft SharePoint connector. I went to a number of meetings to use the GSA hardware for Google Analytics, an effort that never went anywhere. I helped with the effort to convert Gmail to be able to sell it to enterprises. But the Enterprise division was clearly not on the path to Google success.

At the YMCA one Sunday while I was on the LifeCycle, I saw the guy next to me reading what was obviously a Google internal document, and we got to chatting. It was Sridhar Ramaswamy

who at the time was the VP of Ads. One thing led to another, and I transferred to the Ads Quality group. This was the big time, the beating heart of the Google money machine! This will be the next post.

General Philosophy on Transferring

Occasionally I would be asked by someone outside of Google to help them get a job there. Invariably, the prospect would treat it like a “normal” job interview where you meet the “hiring manager” who tells you what they’d be hiring you for.

This is not the way Google worked. There was no “hiring manager” who got to decide whether he or she wanted you. There was a Hiring Committee that reviewed all the feedback from the interviewers, and you were not being hired by some department — you were being hired by Google. Your actual assignment was only made, officially, after you joined.

In practice, it is sometimes a little more like a traditional job, where, if one department is especially interested in you, you’ll have more interviewers from that department. However, there are also people hired on general potential, especially straight out of college, who really don’t have any idea what they’ll be doing.

Since that’s the case, I’d tell people “don’t fixate on your initial assignment. You can always transfer after 18 months, and sometimes even sooner.”

In any case, I had a perfect record of referring people: none of them ever got hired. But they all had their resumes looked at quickly and got a rejection right away. That’s something, anyway:

Next Post

In the next post, I join Ads Quality and rewrite the Sessions code of RASTA, the internal tool that shows the results of experiments. Some of your burning questions are answered about whether Google employees are looking at your traffic and giggling (not as far as I ever heard), and an amusing anecdote about how they trained their models (“AI” being the trendy term for that nowadays): I helped my cousin get a contract job providing the “ground truth” for Ads learning! Watch for it.